This invention relates generally to auditory prostheses and more particularly the invention relates to auditory prostheses having datalogging capabilities.
Auditory prostheses of various types are known and commercially available. Such prostheses include hearing aids, cochlear implants, implantable hearing aids, and vibrotactile devices. One such prosthesis is a programmable hearing aid; see for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,425,481. Such devices have programmable memories for controlling a signal processor for different processing of audio signals. In the specific patent referred to, the user can select one of several programs stored in memory for processing the signals by a manually-operated program control.
The conventional programmable hearing aid has a wide variety of signal-processing capabilities involving signal amplification, automatic gain control, filtering, noise suppression and other characteristics. Thus, a major problem lies in selecting the specific values or set of values of parameters to control the hearing aid for optimum use by each user. While one user might require a wide range of signal processing, another user will better utilize different programs in a more limited range of signal processing. Other conventional hearing aids, while not programmable, are user-adjustable and have similar range adjustment limitations.